Declining levels of state funding pose a potentially fatal threat for public higher education, Louisiana State University President F. King Alexander told a group of faculty, students and researchers Friday.
Alexander, who received his doctorate from UW-Madison, has led LSU during a time when the state slashed funding for the university system by over 50 percent. If states like Louisiana or Wisconsin continue to decrease funding, they would effectively become private institutions, he said.
“LSU is on our football helmets, but why have the ‘S’ if you aren’t going to fund us?” Alexander said in his talk, which was organized by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.
Alexander said research has suggested that states including Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa would not invest any public money in their state university systems by 2032 if current funding patterns continue.
He said these trends have come out of efforts to strengthen private institutions at the expense of public ones. Since 1972, the Pell Grant and other federal funding has been made available to all colleges, public or private.
These policies backfired, Alexander said, with private universities becoming more expensive and enrolling less diverse populations while public schools fought for scarce state dollars.
“This issue of putting public money in public places for public goods is a big issue,” he said. “Because we did the exact opposite.”
But in a year where the price of higher education has been on the lips of presidential candidates and lawmakers from coast to coast, little attention has been paid to what Alexander called “the back-end” of state funding.
“What you hear is the free college, Bernie Sanders’ idea, because it is sexy and in the news,” he said. “What’s behind the scenes is this: They can’t even propose free college tuition if they continue to let states divest from higher education.”
